All That Said…

… When I read a post like this, whose whole argument amounts to “American gun policy must be wrong because people in Paris are ‘bewildered’ by it,” I want to run out immediately and apply for a concealed-carry permit.

And I’m still waiting for a serious and thoughtful response to Ross Douthat’s post on the similarities between our attempts to prohibit alcohol and current exhortations to prohibition of guns.

Now obviously booze and guns aren’t the same kind of thing (even if they are regulated by the same federal bureau). But there are some similarities. Alcohol, like firearms, has (as Gopnik puts it, snidely but accurately) “an ancient history in our city.” Alcohol consumption, like firearm ownership, is mostly the preserve of law-abiding citizens doing no harm to anyone at all. Alcohol drinkers are more common than gun owners, but they’re both large and diverse populations: Per Gallup, 67 percent of Americans are at least occasional drinkers, and 47 percent report that they own a gun. (The latter number has risen faster lately among women and self-identified Democrats.) An experiment in making America the kind of “gun-free society” that Gopnik favors would probably run into some of the same problems that bedeviled Prohibition — alcohol is easier to manufacture, but there’s a high demand for guns and a large enough supply already to sustain a black market more or less indefinitely. On the other hand, a sweeping gun ban would probably save lives, just as Gopnik argues — but then the original Prohibition, for all its unintended consequences, probably saved lives overall as well.

I think the key question prompted by Ross’s column is this: Is someone (like the New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik) who advocates gun prohibition being inconsistent if he or she does not also advocate alcohol prohibition? If not, why not?

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5 Responses to All That Said…

I don’t support prohibition against either, but there is a difference between the two, and supporting the prohibition against gun ownership while not supporting an alcohol prohibition is not necessarily hypocritical. The simplest reason I can think of is while an impaired driver can certainly take out a number of lives on the highway, it pales in comparison to what someone can do with a gun, simply because killing is what a gun is made for. Not being hypocritical doesn’t make it right however. Banning guns isn’t going to do a thing in regards to stopping these types of horrors. If anything, a more effective approach to mental health would be much more cost effective and humane. But mental health care costs money, tax payer money in a lot of cases, and the same people that condemn those less fortunate as lazy and worthless aren’t about to open the purse strings for the crazed and disaffected.

[N.B.: For the record, I didn’t mention hypocrisy as a possibility, only inconsistency. — AJ]

I always get very suspicious when people tell me Ross Douthat is a thoughtful, reasonable conservative. I then start laughing, because if anything is clear from his response to Gopnik, it’s that he’s either deliberately intellectually uncurious or just a flat-out denier of reality.

Why isn’t gun prohibition analogous to alcohol prohibition? Note how his argument proceeds. Alcohol prohibition led to many more evils than it was worth, and that has shown us that prohibition is a vast societal change that should be implemented glacially, if at all. It’s very good that he has dredged up the well-known example of alcohol prohibition–which, because the federal government was miniscule at the time, relied on the power of postal officials, customs agents, and a piddlingly small new bureaucracy of federal enforcers. Since the days of prohibition, the government has grown much larger and stronger, and the tide of federalism has often allowed federal government to impress state and local officials into its service.

More importantly, however, Douthat completely ignores the fact that the United States is not the only advanced nation in the world with laws. This is strange, because he often points to European examples as things to be avoided, but many European OECD nations have much more stringent regulations on gun purchase, possession, and use. Canada is as close a clone as you get to the US culturally and it’s doing just fine with its more stringent gun regulations. England has essentially banned handguns and police officials in many jurisdictions are prohibited from carrying guns. Is it a surprise that other operate prohibition regimes without incident? Well to Douthat and conservatives like him, I suppose it is. And that’s a problem both for conservatism and our public discourse generally. (I shall note that TAC contributors have been much fairer minded when it comes to this, which is why this site is a useful resource to combat the notion that this sort of ignorance or ill-founded sophistry inheres in the ideology of the right.)

Offering an observation that some may find either ironic or quite appropriate: ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, regulates commodities that have been and continue to be of major interest to, importance to and profitable for both organized crime and those individuals who are criminals of opportunity.

I am quite seriously borrowing from something I read in one of Robert A. Heinlein’s works (which shall remain nameless for now) and that is the notion of equal injury suffered for equal injury caused. If a drunk driver kills someone, he should be subject to the death penalty or life imprisonment. If a person is careless using a gun, he or she should suffer the same injury he or she caused, and with the same gun, including a possibly fatal one. Yes, one can draw a parallel to “an eye for an eye” in there, and I don’t really care about sources. What I care about is people being nonchalant about the ability to deal death and maiming to others. Just ask any highway patrol officer, or better yet join me for one week on my 30-mile commute. I don’t drive faster than the posted limit because I can, I do it for shear survival’s sake… except that I use mostly side roads any more, with much thanks from my blood pressure, and a much better chance of survival.

Truly, until people realize the consequences of inebriation and careless weaponry with their own flesh, they are not going to embrace the laws.

Sad Paul Ryan: In the area of pragmatics, I don’t think the serious students of the issue would argue that “less guns” always equals “more crime.” Yes, there are plenty of societies where this is not true: Japan, Canada, Norway, etc. However there are plenty of cases where you have less gun ownership than the US, but higher homicide rates: Mexico, Russia, and Honduras. I don’t think the argument can be won that decreasing the number of guns necessarily saves lives. Instead, there are other factors apart from the availability of guns that contributes to high homicide rates: violence driven by the black market for drugs is one such factor at work. The fundamental argument against gun control from a constitutional perspective is not pragmatic: it is that the individual right to bear arms affirms that political sovereignty rests with the people and not with the central government.

Kierk: the difference is that Canada, Japan and Norway are all developed countries with robust democractic institutions. Russia, Mexico and Honduras … not quite. The question therefore is not whether there is more violence in, say, Haiti than in the US, even though there are fewer guns per capita in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Rather, what is the ideal structure of a democratic society, and whether the culture of gun ownership in the US – and more important, the insistence on more guns as a solution to existing levels of gun violence – is consonant with that ideal. Me, I have lived in a lawless state, and the fact that everyone and their 15-year pimple-ridden sons had automatic weapons did not make me feel one iota safer. (We had a .22 at home; I learned to clean and shoot a .45 Colt and a G3 at 12.) That I do not have a gun, and that my fellow citizens also do not have guns, is how I mark the degree of civilised development of my current home.